International Patent Application No. PCT/AU2005/000580 published under WO 2005/103926 (to which U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/111,946 and published under No. 2005-0262313 corresponds) in the name of the present applicant, discloses how different portions of an application program written to execute on only a single computer can be operated substantially simultaneously on a corresponding different one of a plurality of computers. That simultaneous operation has not been commercially used as of the priority date of the present application. International Patent Application Nos. PCT/AU2005/001641 to which U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/259,885 entitled: “Computer Architecture Method of Operation for Multi-Computer Distributed Processing and Co-ordinated Memory and Asset Handling” corresponds and PCT/AU2006/000532 in the name of the present applicant and unpublished as at the priority date of the present application, also disclose further details. The contents of each of the abovementioned prior application(s) are hereby incorporated into the present application by cross reference for all purposes.
Briefly stated, the abovementioned patent specifications disclose that at least one application program written to be operated on only a single computer can be simultaneously operated on a number of computers each with independent local memory. The memory locations required for the operation of that program are replicated in the independent local memory of each computer. On each occasion on which the application program writes new data to any replicated memory location, that new data is transmitted and stored at each corresponding memory location of each computer. Thus apart from the possibility of transmission delays, each computer has a local memory the contents of which are substantially identical to the local memory of each other computer and are updated to remain so. Since all application programs, in general, read data much more frequently than they cause new data to be written, the abovementioned arrangement enables very substantial advantages in computing speed to be achieved. In particular, the stratagem enables two or more commodity computers interconnected by a commodity communications network to be operated simultaneously running under the application program written to be executed on only a single computer.
High-level languages including JAVA and MICROSOFT.NET are written to be operated on only a single computer and have two types of memory locations or fields. The first of these is a so-called “primitive” field which contains alphanumeric data such as numbers or letters. This content is easily duplicated merely by being copied to another primitive field. The second type of field is a “non-primitive” field generally termed a reference field which essentially contains “a pointer” to another memory location or another object. The programming language written to be operated on only a single computer uses one or more pointers to re-direct the operation of the computer to the referenced address. In a multiple computer system, if the pointers were slavishly copied then they would point to identical memory locations in the other machines but these locations may, or may not, have the same memory contents.
The genesis of the present invention is a desire to facilitate the replication of non-primitive fields in a multiple computer system thereby permitting the desired goal of substantially identical memory structure and content to be approached as closely as possible.